The following description includes information that may be useful in understanding the present invention. It is not an admission that any of the information provided herein is prior art or relevant to the presently claimed invention, or that any publication specifically or implicitly referenced is prior art.
WO 2009/000070, which is incorporated herein by reference, describes a sunlight redirector in which longitudinally adjacent plane mirrors are pivotally interconnected by non-stretching linkages to form a columnar array (see FIG. 1 hereof). The non-stretching linkages constrain movement of the mirrors such that their normal vectors remain parallel. Pivotable couplings (not shown in FIG. 1 hereof, but see WO 2009/000070) permit movement of the mirrors with respect to two mutually perpendicular axes and prevent movement of the mirrors with respect to a third axis which is perpendicular to the other two axes. Actuators (not shown in FIG. 1 hereof, but see WO 2009/000070) controllably move the mirrors to orient their normal vectors such that the mirrors reflect incident light in a desired direction. The actuators can be adaptively controlled to move the mirrors to track the sun, and thereby continually redirect sunlight into a specific direction, e.g. through a wall opening to illuminate the interior of a building.
Such mirror arrays are useful in building core daylight illumination systems, as explained in WO 2009/000070. It is desirable that such mirror arrays be thin, to facilitate mounting the arrays on or within building walls. A thin mirror array can be formed from a large number of small mirrors. However, a disadvantage of this approach is that the required number of mirrors increases in inverse proportion to the square of the thickness of the array, potentially prohibitively increasing the cost of constructing a suitably thin array. Thus, there is still a need for improved sunlight redirectors and mirror arrays.